Modern industrial facilities can comprise a large number of machines operating independently or in conjunction to manufacture a product or manage a process. These can include such high-powered machines as welders, multi-ton stamping presses, pumps, machining robots, load bearing conveyors, mixers, and the like. Given the power of their operations, it can require a large amount of energy to drive these machines. Consequently, the cost of energy consumption is one of the largest expenses faced by an industrial enterprise. For this reason, plant engineers strive to efficiently manage their plants' energy loads to ensure that energy is consumed as efficiently as possible.
The need to optimize a facility's energy usage is balanced against the facility's primary goal of manufacturing a desired product at a rate commensurate with current business concerns. It is therefore important at all times to weigh the costs and benefits of adjusting production output in view of the corresponding changes in energy utilization. However, this cost-benefit analysis is often a function, not only of the direct relationship between product output and energy utilization, but of current business objectives or goals. These business objectives are rarely static, but instead vary based on such factors as current demand for a particular product, an amount of excess product currently in stock, current budgetary restrictions, real-time energy costs, revenue generated by a particular product, or other such considerations. Decisions regarding when and how long to run a particular machine must take into account these varying conditions.
Given the many and varied considerations that must be examined in order to optimize energy utilization and product output in a facility, there is a need for a load management solution that can schedule and prioritize load usage in a facility based on one or more specified production goals. It is also desirable that such a load management system can be easily integrated with a new or existing general control system without the need for complicated custom programming or specialized instrumentation.